When the Present Is Past It Looks Much Prettier

‘Harvard Square’ by André Aciman

André Aciman is a connoisseur of nostalgia, like a contemporary Proust. A French-speaking Jew expelled from Egypt with his family in the early 1960s, when he was 15, he now lives in New York and writes in precise and elegant English. But in his novels and memoirs he takes a certain melancholy pleasure in considering himself a permanent exile, which is for him less a condition of displacement than one of disappointment and vacillation. Wherever he finds himself he’s less happy than where he was just before, and you sometimes get the sense that he feels truly at home only in memory, in the places he reconstructs for himself on the page.

The Harvard Square in his elegiac new novel of the same title is such a place, softened by the glow of what he calls “after love.” Most of the book is set in the late 1970s, when the actual Harvard Square was grittier and less touristy than it is now, a place where town and gown, bohemians and poseurs, all rubbed elbows and sometimes clashed.

The novel begins in a basement cafe one afternoon when the narrator — unnamed but very Aciman-like in his résumé: an Egyptian Jew and Harvard graduate student spending a lonely summer studying for his comprehensive exams, which he has already flunked once — overhears a bearded, brown-skinned man fulminating in French against America and Americans.

This is Kalaj, or Monsieur Kalashnikov, as he is sometimes known because of his rapid-fire, take-no-prisoners way of speaking: “Their continental breakfasts are jumbo-ersatz, their extra-long cigarettes are jumbo-ersatz, their huge steak dinners with whopping all-you-can-eat salads are jumbo-ersatz, their refilled mugs of all-you-can-drink coffee, their faux-mint mouthwash with triple pack toothpaste and extra toothbrushes thrown in for value, their cars, their malls, their universities, even their monster television sets and spectacular big-screen epics, all, all of it, jumbo ersatz.”

As the narrator points out perhaps too often, he and Kalaj, a Tunisian Muslim cabdriver, couldn’t be less alike. The narrator is shy, diffident and self-conscious. Kalaj is bombastic, reckless and self-important. The narrator is hopeless with the opposite sex, while Kalaj is an inspired dragueur, or cruiser after women, who believes with patient pursuit no one will fail to succumb. But this is a novel, after all, and so inevitably the two strike up a friendship, based in part on a shared feeling of not belonging and mutual homesickness for an imagined France, and in part on something like the pedagogical model of “Zorba the Greek” or Robert Bly’s “Iron John”: Kalaj becomes the earthy, primitive wild man who teaches the nerdy intellectual to get in touch with his inner sensual self.

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André AcimanCredit
Sigrid Estrafda

Kalaj is “my Mr. Hyde,” the narrator thinks, “my very, very rough draft. Me unmasked, unchained, unleashed.” Under his friend’s tutelage the narrator even starts to have success with girls — first with a neighbor in his apartment building, then with someone he meets through Kalaj and finally with a seemingly unobtainable WASP undergrad, who comes from a well-to-do family in Chestnut Hill.

This friendship of opposites is entertaining enough, but “Harvard Square” is more interesting in its exploration of what it means to be an outsider. Kalaj’s bluster turns out to have a bullying, self-pitying side, and his apparent hatred of America reveals itself as love in disguise. He doesn’t have a green card and so rejects America pre-emptively, lest it reject him first.

In a funny, if unlikely, episode the narrator gets him a job as an assistant French instructor at Harvard, even though Kalaj’s own grasp of French grammar is a little shaky. (Maybe standards were looser then?) Kalaj becomes popular with his students, is invited to a formal teacher-student dinner, and is instantly hooked on Harvard and its privilege.

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The narrator is more tortured. He yearns to be part of Harvard’s tweedy, patrician precincts and at the same time hates himself for wanting it so badly. The closer he becomes to Kalaj, the more embarrassed he is to be seen with him. And all his love affairs end badly because what he most wants, it turns out, is not intimacy but to savor his aloneness.

Both in its prose and in its feeling “Harvard Square” is less charged than Mr. Aciman’s previous novels, “Call Me By Your Name” and “Eight White Nights.” His writing, which can occasionally become overheated, is here lucid and direct, and the book is often slyly comic. In one episode the narrator, Kalaj and their respective girlfriends at the time drive out to Walden Pond, a place whose significance none of them fully understands, and Kalaj winds up urinating in the hallowed waters.

But the bond between Kalaj and the narrator is less fraught and intense than the relationships in the earlier books, and the stakes are lower. The friendship concludes abruptly, like the friendship between Falstaff and Prince Hal and for pretty much the same reason, only — because we don’t see it from Kalaj’s point of view — the breakup feels less tragic.

If the novel has a weakness it’s the tidiness with which Mr. Aciman wraps everything up, in an ending that’s both sentimental and that suggests the drawback of dwelling too much in places on the page. Walking around Cambridge years later, the narrator imagines himself hailing his friend’s old Checker cab, driving around to the old haunts while talking to the new owner, and finding there a message. This little interval is touching and beautifully written, but it takes place in a Harvard Square of the mind, not the real one.

HARVARD SQUARE

By André Aciman

292 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.95.

A version of this review appears in print on April 11, 2013, on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: When the Present Is Past It Looks Much Prettier. Today's Paper|Subscribe